Pulling OpenSea off the throne and teaching all Layer 2, who is the strongest catfish 'Tieshun' in Web3?

Produced by Vernacular Blockchain (ID: hellobtc)

The encryption field is full of countless amazing legends. For example, even though Hayden Adams had no programming experience, he created the masterpiece Uniswap as soon as he entered the Web3 field. Andre Cronje (AC) is known as the “King of DeFi” with his unique charm, and has led dozens of well-known projects to achieve great success with his personal power. It is not uncommon for these technology giants to create huge waves in a specific field or even the entire encryption industry.

And Blur founder Pacman (better known as his Chinese name "Tieshun") is undoubtedly the most popular representative of the new generation in the past year.

However, what is slightly different from Hayden Adams and AC is that although Tieshun debuted for only more than a year, it has continuously profoundly affected and even subverted the three tracks of NFT trading market, NFT lending, and Ethereum L2. , can be called "Web3's strongest catfish".

01. Who is "Tieshun"?

In October 2022, the NFT trading market Blur was officially launched (paradigm led the investment of US$11 million in seed round financing). Although platforms such as LooksRare and x2y2 have already tried to solve the problem of delay by combining Token economic incentives. OpenSea, which issued the token, launched vampire attacks, but they had little effect and failed to change OpenSea's dominant market position.

Until Blur emerged, it completely changed the landscape of the entire NFT trading market. This almost directly led to OpenSea's valuation being "cut in half" in the following year, reducing it by 90% from more than 13 billion US dollars, and even considering selling the company.

Blur immediately introduced zero transaction fees (5% for OpenSea), explicit airdrops and custom royalties upon launch. These three strategies allowed the community to spread quickly and successfully attracted the first users.

Blur then used TokenAirdrop's strategy to encourage users to actively participate in "pending orders and wash volume", further improving its trading liquidity and depth, thus expanding the platform's advantages. This strategy made Blur's overall user experience quickly surpass OpenSea.

By the beginning of 2023, Blur has replaced Opensea as the new leader in the market. As the "catfish" of the NFT trading market, the long-lasting NFT trading market has ushered in a long-lost variable.

Against this background, on February 22, 2023, Pacman, the founder of Blur, who had always remained anonymous, tweeted to introduce his basic situation:

He dropped out of high school and college twice, and joined the well-known entrepreneurial incubator Y Combinator at the age of 17. He then studied mathematics and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received the Thiel Scholarship founded by billionaire Peter Thiel.

As a serial entrepreneur, Blur is his third entrepreneurial project and his second in the crypto world - the first was a company called Namebase, which has been sold Give it to Namecheap.

In addition, he also said that when he created Blur, he had considered whether to use his real identity or remain anonymous, and discussed this issue with Anish Agnihotri of Polychain Capital. In the end, Anish said, "Anonymous first can be public, but not the other way around” convinced him, and he finally decided to use anonymity first.

However, Pacman did not directly disclose his real name, but some insiders dug up the relevant information on social media and found out that his real name is suspected to be Tieshun Roquerre (from which Tieshun's name comes).

02, NFT and the top "wall-breaker" in the L2 track

As Wenchu ​​said, the most different thing between Tieshun and other crypto entrepreneurs such as the founder of Uniswap is that It has been tossing all the way, and has stirred up many tracks with new products - after launching Blur in 2022, subverting the pattern of the NFT trading market, Tieshun did not stop there, and then successively launched Blend and Blast to slaughter other tracks.

In April 2023, Blur officially launched Blend, which stirred up the NFT lending market, especially bringing new variables to the NFT lending and liquidity fields.

As a peer-to-peer perpetual lending agreement, Blend supports any collateral including NFT, but does not rely on oracles and has no settlement date, allowing borrowing positions to remain open indefinitely until liquidated, with interest rates set by The market decides.

Like Blur, Blend has extremely strong momentum. The total amount of ETH issued has exceeded 50,000 in just two weeks, and it has quickly grown into the leader in the field of NFT lending.

After "Blast" kicked off the expected point-based Airdrop, it successfully led a new round of capital enclosure war, and the current nuggets about its ecological project have also become a key issue of community concern,

Then in November 2023, Tieshun took action again, eyeing the Ethereum L2 field, launching Blast and still using the well-known Airdrop play method, relying on the three kings of pledge interest, Airdrop expectations and invitation system, 5 days TVL exceeded US$500 million, surpassing star L2 projects such as zkSync, Starknet, and Linea in one fell swoop.

You must know that Blast has not yet been launched on the main network at this time, and there are no users who can experience participating DApps. In this way, TVL still breaks through the integer level one after another, quickly attracting huge funds of up to 2.3 billion US dollars in more than three months. , the growth rate is crazy.

The Blast mainnet was also launched at the beginning of this month, announcing that 50% of the Airdrop will be allocated to Blast Points (users), and the remaining 50% will be allocated to Blast Gold (DApp).

Generally speaking, Tieshun can be said to be the top "wall-breaker" in various mature tracks:

NFT trading track: Blur overturned OpenSea, which was firmly established in Diaoyutai, and became a new One of the mainstream NFT markets;

NFT borrowing track: Blend’s total transaction volume has exceeded 5 billion US dollars, becoming the leader and firmly sitting on Diaoyutai;

L2 track: Blast’s TVL has exceeded 2.5 billion In US dollars, according to L2Beat statistics, it is second only to Arbitrum (US$14.4 billion) and Optimism (US$8.1 billion), higher than a series of other L2s such as starknet and zkSync, and ranks among the top three L2s.

图源：L2Beat

03. What is the right or wrong way to play "Web3 Pinduoduo"?

To a certain extent, Tieshun is using a mature Web3 product strategy with its own Web2 style to reduce dimensionality and attack a number of Web3 products:

明牌Airdrop, flow thinking, creating liquidity, etc., are all the same from the original Blur, to Blend and now Blast.

Including his first encryption entrepreneurial project Namebase mentioned above. If we look back, we can vaguely see the "bidding order auction" and "Airdrop" currently used on Blur and Blast. Operation strategy, which also shows that Tieshun's success is inseparable from his consistent product concepts and the summary of previous entrepreneurial experiences.

In fact, regarding products and marketing, Tieshun once expressed in the interview that part of the inspiration for Blur's growth strategy came from Taobao, but I personally feel that it may be more appropriate to summarize it as "Web3 Pinduoduo", especially Blast's "Airdrop anticipating social fission" gameplay is essentially a replica of Pinduoduo's marketing strategy in Web3:

is similar to the "cutting" of Moments. After the launch of Blast, social media was once filled with invitation codes Related tweets are very successful both in terms of spread effect and growth rate.

Including Blast’s points gameplay and exit mechanism that have recently caused controversy in the community - the multiplier points and withdrawals that are more friendly to new users require 14 days of waiting after the funds are withdrawn to the mainnet. During the withdrawal period, it is also easy to think of Pinduoduo’s logic of “new users get more” and “last penny”.

Therefore, Tieshun’s strength may lie in thoroughly understanding the mature gameplay of Web2 Internet marketing from the product marketing level and flexibly applying it in the Web3 field, thus achieving a one-way crushing of existing Web3 products - grasping Seize the market pain points, attract user traffic and market liquidity through Airdrop, and continue to accumulate its own advantages to achieve reversal.

04. Summary

If Blur’s success comes from seizing the pain points of the market and innovating in gameplay, then Blast has quite a dark sense of humor - it has no application, The new L2, driven purely by the expectation of Airdrop, has achieved such results in just a few months.

Is it the application scenario that chooses L2 because of its better efficiency, or is it because the efficiency experience of L2 can promote better application scenarios? Blast has also stimulated a great discussion in the community about L2 efficiency and application. Its novel approach has subverted the previous growth model of L2 to some extent. Perhaps we can try to find a new path of TVL first and then application.

Looking from another perspective, Tieshun is indeed a leader in Web3 products and marketing. Which track will he "subvert" next? let us wait and see.

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